


Strange Enough

by CyborgShepard



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Medical Procedures, Mild Gore, Moira Logic is the Best Logic, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 01:29:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13020390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyborgShepard/pseuds/CyborgShepard
Summary: And even though they argue, and fight, and Moira wants to hold her by the throat most of the time, Angela’s the only other person in the world that she trusts.





	Strange Enough

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Warmth prompt from the Moicy discord!

Outside, the world is ending.

Rain pelts the smouldering city, so loud that the private’s screams are muffled. Blood and grease sluice through the cobblestone streets, and washes under the flaps of the tent every time the medics haul another shattered body in. The stench is incredible. Absently, as she gouges the better half of a bullet from the private’s lower lumbar, Moira wonders if she’ll die here.

“O’Deorain,” gasps the medic, who hasn’t slept right in days, “Lieutenant Vickson. Vitals critical but… stable. Collapsed left lung, several rib fractures, heavy blood loss due to extreme--” he breaks off as he eyes the deep slash across the soldier’s left shoulder. From a glance, Moira can see bone. “--Lacerations to shoulder.”

Moira sniffs. For how cold it is here, her loose hair sticks to her forehead with sweat, and her undershirt clings to her in all the wrong ways. The chill seeps deep. She glances up at her nurse, and nods towards the whimpering man on the stretcher. “McIntosh, apply nanogel and gauze to the shoulder, then put him in a biopod. I don’t have time if it isn’t serious.”

The nurse pauses. “Doctor,” she starts, swallows. “The biopods are full.”

Oh.

“Oh.”

The monitor the whimpering private is hooked to begins to blip shakily.

Critical but stable. Moira sneers, and throws her pliers on the table. Only if he has life support.

She tries a steadying breath through her nose, and throws a glance to the cot they’ve been sharing in shifts over the past few weeks. It’s pushed far in the corner and shielded by a thin, frosted curtain.

Ziegler’s only been asleep for two hours, but she’s due to wake up within the next hour. Moira considers… no, she doesn’t know how much Ziegler took in order to fall asleep in the first place. In this war it’s impossible to sleep unaided, but it’s caused a variable that’s too unbalanced. She looks back to McIntosh.

“Patch him and begin a transfusion,” she calls to the medic. “McIntosh, this is important. I need to you manually administer the cell regen. Have you done it before?”

Even with the blood-splattered mask hiding half the nurse’s face, Moira can see how terrified she is. Her eyes are wide and young. “No,” she whispers.

Black blood oozes across her fingers as she pries more bullet from the private’s spine. Beneath her he sobs.

Inexperienced or drugged out? Moria doesn’t know which is the lesser of two evils.

She knows Ziegler could do it, but she also knows that as soon as they patch up Vickson he’ll be sent out to die once more.

“Thirty mil over an hour,” she tells McIntosh, and drops more shrapnel into the steel pan. “Go steady. Too fast and he’ll go into cardiac arrest, but you can’t ever stop til it’s done.”

Moira pulls her mask down and stares her right in the eye. “Can you do it?”

The nurse nods.

Moira knows she can’t. Her hands are shaking as she pulls off her gloves and helps the medics move Vickson from the stretcher to a cot, where another nurse is checking his tags for his blood type.

Moira knows Vickson will die today, or tomorrow. He’ll be lucky to make it til Thursday. Any of them would be.  
  
Gunfire trills outside, and then the field medics are running out of the tent with their comms crackling, and a gush of freezing air spills in and seeps into her bones. Outside, something explodes, far enough away to not be an immediate threat, but close enough to make her ears ring.

This is Hell, Moira thinks. It has to be.

Another nurse fills McIntosh’s space by her side, quickly setting up the biogel and gauze she’ll need to close the gash over the private’s spine. There are miniscule flecks of lead still stippling his back, but they’re too close to the nerves and bone, and Moira’s vision is flickering. His pulse evens out to a steady beep that fills her head and rattles her teeth.

“Finish Private Kentworth up, then move him to the infirmary,” Moira instructs. “As soon as a biopod is free have him in it. Even if it’s just ten minutes.”

The infirmary is sectioned off from the surgery, and is little more than a tent filled with cots, and ten invaluable biopods. The surgery is nothing but a table and her tools, and just enough sedative to keep things quiet. Moira can’t remember the last time she’d worked in these conditions. This must be the worst of the crisis.

She doesn’t think on it long before Morrison is pushing into the tent. His visor shields most of his face; blood covers the rest. It spills from a slice under his cheekbone, that curves down over the edge of his mouth.

“Commander,” Moira greets flatly.

“We hit their dropship,” says Morrison, and a fresh pulse of blood dribbles from his cut. He sounds as dead as she feels. “Now it’s a matter of cleaning up the stragglers, otherwise all fighting has been halted.”

They thought they’d made progress four days ago.

“For now.”

They hadn’t.

“Yes, for now.”

With a sigh Moira peels off her blood-soaked gloves, and throws them and her mask in the overflowing bin under the table. “When do we leave?”

“Once we have the town officially secured. And once my troops stop dying.” Morrison weighs her up. “There’ll be a briefing in the morning. If we are still alive.”

Ah, yes. Always the briefings. “Thank you, Commander.” She gestures to her own jaw. “Would you like me to…?”

Morrison shakes his head. “I have to spread the word to those without comms.” He pointedly looks over at the corner where Ziegler lies. He doesn’t ask, but he doesn’t need to, because Moira knows.

“She’s alright,” Moira tells him softly, and from the infinitesimal way his shoulders slump she knows she just abated something crawling through Jack’s chest. The same thing has been slithering through hers for the three weeks they’ve been here. She offers him a sympathetic smile. “Just tired. But she’ll be pleased to know the good news.”

“One day this’ll be over, O’Deorain. This crisis can’t go on forever.” With that, Morrison turns and pushes back through the flaps of the tent, and the cold wind and spitting rain sends a shiver down Moira’s back.

She peels herself out of her sticky, bloody scrubs. She supposes he’s right. It doesn’t feel like this will be over any time soon, but nothing lasts forever.

Moira knows she should go check on McIntosh, and if Ziegler were crowding over her she would. But Angela isn’t, so she won’t, and if Vickson doesn’t get into a pod soon he won’t make it through the night, but that’s on her. Like so many things already are.

She tentatively flexes her right hand; of all the frozen parts of her, her hand is the worst, the nails black at the roots and her knuckles bluing.

Moira sniffs, and pulls on a disposable glove, and pointedly does not look at her hand again.

Perhaps seeing Angela hear the good news might brighten things up. Unlike her, the surgeon is always trying to lift spirits, and rarely gets an attitude. Moira lingers by the curtain, and clears her throat.

“Angela,” Moira coos softly, but from what she can see of the obscured woman, she doesn’t stir. Moira tries again, but still nothing. She throws a look over her shoulder, but no one in the tent is paying her mind.

Tentatively, Moira parts the curtain -- a pathetic, haphazard attempt at privacy -- with her left hand, the rings sliding along the iron bar overhead and chinking together lightly.

In the cot, Angela is sleeping on her side, curled in on herself and wearing her long-sleeved undershirt and her slacks. She’s kicked off the threadbare, military-grade blanket. A thin layer of sweat glistens on her forehead, but she’s shivering, and Moira tries not to sigh.

It wouldn’t hurt for Angela to rest even thirty minutes in a biopod, but the woman would sooner die than take someone else’s place. And if she found out that Moira had switched her into one, she’d kill her.

Her eyes flicker lightning quick beneath her lids, fingers clenching around the flimsy pillow under her head. As Moira skirts the cot, she wonders what Angela’s dreaming. Of battles, and robots taller than buildings. Glimmering cities that sit just on the horizon, always just too far out of sight. Of being elbow deep in someone’s rib cage, and drowning in the pooling blood.

Or maybe, thinks Moira, as she sits on the edge of the cot; maybe Angela’s dreaming of her.

She pulls a flaxen tress of sweat-slick hair back and tucks it behind her ear, watches her. Her chest rises and falls, and rises and falls, steady to the sound of the monitors around them. The nurses murmur softly, thunder cracks the sky outside. But Angela doesn’t stir. Moira lets her eyes wander. She’s been the one constant in all of this.

And even though they argue, and fight, and Moira wants to hold her by the throat most of the time, Angela’s the only other person in the world that she trusts.

The cot is scarcely big enough for one body, let alone two, but Moira crowds in, and arranges herself around Angela. Her right arm settles over her waist, her left arm under her own head, in lieu of a pillow. Her feet hang off the edge of the metal frame, and there’s dry blood caked around her cuticles, but it’s only like this that Moira feels like she can breathe again.

In her arms, Angela sighs, and pushes back, ever so slightly.

“Hmm,” Angela purrs, her hand sleepily moving over her hip. “Is it that time already?” Her fingers find Moira’s, she laces them together and Moira pretends she doesn’t feel the chill lance through her chest.

She clears her throat, and lets Angela take her hand. “Good news. We should be moving out tomorrow morning.”

A pause. “We won?”

“I suppose.”

Angela clenches her hand.

“What time is it now?”

Moira hasn’t been keeping track. At first she’d marked the hours by how many patients she had, and by the rounds the nurses performed. Towards the end, there’d been too many to keep track of.

“Maybe three, or four in the morning,” she guesses. “You’ve slept a few hours.”

“And did you… did anyone…”

Moira thinks back to Vickson. Maybe the nurse saved him. Maybe he’ll go home, and leave Overwatch for good. Moira thinks she’d like to, if she got the chance. Go to the glittering city where the sky ends.

Maybe Angela would go with her.

“No,” she soothes. With her free hand she cards her fingers through the soft hairs at Angela’s nape. “No, the world isn’t ending today.”

Angela squeezes her hand again. “Well done.”

They’re silent, long enough for Moira’s eyes to start to close and her mind to drift. On the precipice of sleep and wakefulness, Angela asks Moira something strange. “Is the world cold, though?”

“Mm?” is all Moira can manage. She doesn’t miss the note of something lacing Angela’s voice. Worry? No. Disappointment?

“Is it cold tonight?” She swallows. “Because your hand is freezing.”

Moira doesn’t answer. Instead she pulls out of Angela’s grip, and presses her hand to Angela’s chest, where her shirt sticks and her heart beats steadily.

Where it’s warm.

 


End file.
